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Dead baby's family 'harassed' by anti-vax campaigners

A NSW family says they have been harassed by anti-vaccination campaigners ever since their four-week-old daughter died of whooping cough four years ago.

Toni and David McCaffery said they were targeted by campaigners after their baby Dana died in March 2009 and they chose to speak out about the importance of immunisation, the Sunday Telegraph reports

The couple said they had received abusive messages, anonymous letters and been targeted online ever since.

Mrs McCaffery told the Sunday Telegraph "the lunacy and the venom directed at us has just been torture - it's frightening, abhorrent and insensitive in the extreme".

"We were being told you're horrible and you'll kill other people, diminishing what my child went through, that she was weak anyway and it was natural selection," she said.

The McCaffery's said they received numerous hateful messages via Dana's website, including one that said "harden the f--- up" and another that read: "I could walk through a ward of babies dying from whooping cough or any other infectious disease and it would not affect my decision to not vaccinate my children."

The founder of anti-vaccination group Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), Meryl Dorey, also posted her own claims about the alleged dangers of vaccinations on Dana's memorial website.

Despite the abuse, the couple said they are determined to keep campaigning to educate people about the important of vaccinations.